When the Gallows Claims to Know the Future
This article examines the death penalty through a question that reaches beyond crime and punishment to the limits of human knowledge itself: how can a fallible institution impose a decision that can never be corrected? Through the concepts of the “paradox of final certainty,” the “occupation of knowability,” and “the right to justice before the human being is beyond its reach,” the essay moves from contemporary Ahwazi cases and the memory of Reisan Al-Sari to a wider inquiry into life, sovereignty, and meaning: does the power to end a human life confer the right to close that person’s future or define the meaning of their existence?
An article marking the World Day Against the Death Penalty — 10 October 2026
The gallows is not most dangerous when it kills a human being.
It is most dangerous when it claims, in the name of a human institution, that this person’s future has ended before it has even arrived.
The death penalty does not pass judgment only on an act committed in the past; it closes off everything that might have happened afterward. It assumes that the human being will not change, will not correct a mistake, will not reveal a truth, will not testify to what happened to him, and will not add to the world something that did not exist before.
When a human institution carries out a death sentence, it is not merely saying: We know what this person did.
It is saying something greater:
We know enough about everything he could become, and we have decided that the future will not contain a single reason worthy of keeping him alive.
And here begins the question that precedes both the judiciary and politics:
By what knowledge can a human institution confiscate a future that has not yet happened?
One of the most important conditions of disciplined knowledge is that it recognizes the possibility of error and correction. Knowledge that does not allow new evidence to change its conclusion does not protect the truth; it protects itself from the truth.
The judiciary recognizes appeals, retrials, the quashing of judgments, and the emergence of new evidence for the same reason: the judge is human, the investigator is human, the witness is human, the expert is human, and the system that gathers and interprets evidence is a system made by human beings.
Everything human beings make carries the possibility of error.
But the death penalty introduces a decisive contradiction into this structure: it takes a system that acknowledges the possibility of error and gives it an outcome that abolishes the possibility of correction.
The closer a decision comes to being impossible to correct, the narrower the morally acceptable margin for error becomes.
A reviewable decision can be suspended, modified, or overturned if a new truth emerges. An execution leaves justice no opportunity to correct itself once it has been carried out.
From this arises the “paradox of final certainty”:
The more final a punishment becomes, the more complete the knowledge it requires; yet human institutions possess neither complete knowledge nor immunity from error.
It is therefore not enough to ask: Does the system consider it likely that the accused is guilty?
We must also ask:
Does a fallible system have the right to produce an outcome it cannot correct if it later discovers that it was wrong?
Rejecting the death penalty does not mean denying the crime, erasing the suffering of victims, or exempting the perpetrator from accountability. Justice is required to protect society, uncover the truth, hold the offender accountable, and do justice to those harmed.
But the strength of justice is not measured by its ability to imitate the crime in its finality.
Justice can punish without claiming infallibility, and it can protect society without permanently closing the possibility of correcting its own error. But when it makes death its final answer, it does not merely punish the human being; it destroys the bridge across which truth might return.
In Ahwaz, the “paradox of final certainty” does not reach us from books of philosophy.
It reaches us through the names of human beings:
Masoud Jamei.
Alireza Mardasi Hamidavi.
Farshad Etemadi-Far.
Reza Abdali Daghagheleh.
These names are not an abstract idea about death. Their cases have entered the communications of the United Nations Special Procedures, accompanied by serious concerns relating to torture, arbitrary detention, coerced confessions, access to legal counsel, and fair-trial guarantees.
More importantly, that same UN communication recalled that, in countries that have not abolished the death penalty, it may be imposed only for the “most serious crimes”, a threshold the Human Rights Committee has interpreted restrictively as crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing. The communication stated that the death sentences imposed on Reza Abdali, Masoud Jamei, Farshad Etemadi-Far, and Alireza Mardasi did not appear to meet that threshold.
Also within this circle of danger is Hassan Moslawi (Al-Tarfi), who human rights reports stated in June 2026 had been informed in Sheiban Prison that his death sentence had become final after being upheld by Iran’s Supreme Court. His name does not appear among the four individuals addressed in UN communication IRN 23/2025; his absence from that communication should therefore not become an absence from international attention.
At this point, the defect is no longer a procedural detail. When a human life depends on a truth being sought in an environment where transparency is incomplete, the integrity of the path leading to that truth becomes part of the right to life itself.
The most final punishment requires the environment in which visibility is greatest. If it is produced in the environment in which visibility is lowest, two dangers converge in a single decision: incomplete knowledge and the impossibility of correction.
But in Ahwaz, a deeper question precedes even the question of judicial error:
From where does an institution of occupation derive the right to try the owner of the land in the name of an authority imposed upon him by force?
Independent Ahwazi Arab rule was overthrown on 20 April 1925, and the authority of the Iranian state was imposed on Ahwaz by military force. From this coercive origin emerged the relationship within which the institutions of occupation operate, including the judiciary.
The international community committed a historic error when it allowed recognition of Iran as a state to extend, without examination, into acceptance of the legitimacy of its sovereignty over Ahwaz.
Recognition of a state is not a deed of title to every land it has subjected by force. Prolonged silence does not transform occupation into a right, nor does it make an authority imposed upon the owners of the land legitimate.
What happened was not recognition of a legal reality established by evidence, but blind acceptance of a map made by force and then inherited by international institutions as though it were the original.
The international community must correct this error: not by granting the Ahwazi Arab people their right, because that right is not created by the recognition of others, but by ceasing to transform the fait accompli created by occupation into a legitimacy under whose protection its institutions operate.
The consequences of this international error become still more grave when the legitimacy conferred upon the fait accompli becomes a shield for the institutions of occupation, including a judiciary that grants itself the power to sentence the owner of the land to death when those very institutions were originally imposed upon him by force.
An institution does not cleanse the origin of the force that created its jurisdiction, and occupation does not become legitimate because it places a judge between the prison and the gallows.
Law does not become law merely because it has been written in the register of authority, and the judiciary does not become justice merely because killing was ordered in a judgment.
When the judiciary is used to criminalize the identity of the Ahwazi human being, punish his objection to occupation, extract his confession under torture, or issue a final judgment after a trial lacking its essential guarantees, it does not stand between the human being and force; it becomes force dressed in the robes of the judiciary.
Here, the gallows does not kill an individual alone.
It sends a message to his family, his city, and his entire people: the authority that occupied the land wants to decide who lives upon it, who speaks, who objects, and who is erased.
In this sense, execution is not merely a punishment within a system of occupation; it can become one of the instruments through which that occupation continues.
Killing removes a human being. Detention isolates a human being. Torture breaks a body. But intimidation seeks more than that: it seeks to make fear a permanent guard for occupation within society.
An occupation that needs the gallows in order to survive does not offer evidence of its legitimacy; it offers an admission of its inability to produce acceptance without fear.
This characterization does not relieve us of the duty to establish the violation in each individual case, nor does it permit us to turn suspicion into fact. Every case requires its own evidence, and every claim requires the appropriate degree of certainty.
But examining each case separately must not blind us to the structure within which the cases recur.
The fact establishes what happened to a particular human being.
Analysis reveals why the same machinery is capable of reproducing that fact.
And before we ask, “Did we know the truth?” we must ask: Were the conditions for knowing it ever present in the first place?
The investigation is behind closed doors.
The body is behind walls.
The confession is inside a room the world cannot see.
The family knows fragments of the truth.
The lawyer may arrive late, or may be denied access to what the judgment was built upon.
And the human being whose body carries the memory of the interrogation sometimes becomes the most important witness to what happened to him.
Then comes the final judgment.
If the authority detaining a human being controls his location, his record, his body, access to him, and the time at which he is able to speak, it does not control the human being alone; it may also control the paths through which the world can know what is happening to him.
This is the connection between execution and what I have previously called the “occupation of knowability.”
But integrity does not allow us to turn every void into evidence, just as it does not allow us to treat every void as though it were innocent.
Honest knowledge does not fill a void with what it wants.
It asks first: Who created it? How was it created? And who was prevented from reaching what might have revealed it?
With an irreversible punishment, it is not enough for the authority to say that it found no evidence of torture if that same authority controls the body, the place, the record, and the path leading to the evidence.
The absence of truth from the public sphere does not prove that the truth does not exist if the conditions for its appearance have been detained alongside the human being.
That is why the lawyer is not a detail.
Bodily integrity is not a detail.
An independent investigation into an allegation of torture is not a detail.
A family’s knowledge of its son’s whereabouts is not a detail.
Medical care is not a detail.
Transparency of evidence is not a detail.
The possibility of reviewing the judgment is not a detail.
Each of these safeguards is a distance between a living human being and an irreversible decision.
Under international human rights law, if a death sentence is imposed following a trial in which the essential guarantees of justice have not been respected, the defect does not remain confined to trial procedure; it extends to the right to life itself.
But law, however precise it may be on paper, does not protect a human being merely by existing.
The real test of institutions is not: Do they possess a correct rule?
It is: Does the rule reach the human being when he has no power, and before its application becomes incapable of saving him?
From this arises “the right to be reached by justice before it is too late for the human being.”
Justice is not measured only by the correctness of the conclusion it reaches, but by its ability to arrive before the right itself becomes impossible to save.
Twenty years later, the archive can be opened, it can be discovered that the trial was defective, a report can be written, an apology can be offered, and the dead person’s name can be restored to the record of the innocent.
But no report can give him back his next morning.
Time is not an external circumstance of justice; it is part of justice.
A truth that arrives after the execution may correct the record, but it cannot save the person whose right was at stake.
What value is there in the world learning after the gallows what it could have known before it?
In Ahwazi memory, the image of Reisan al-Sari before the gallows has remained.
He is remembered kissing the rope with which he was to be executed.
I do not read this image as a glorification of death, nor as a call for the living to make the gallows a path through which they prove their love for their land.
Death is not a homeland.
The rope is not a test of dignity.
And no human being should have to die to prove that he is worthy of freedom.
But the image carries another meaning that remained larger than the moment in which it was captured.
The instrument of death tried to impose upon Reisan the meaning of his final moment, and he wrested from it its monopoly on meaning.
The rope was saying: You are now at your weakest.
The kiss was saying something the gallows could not understand:
You may possess the moment when my body stops, but you do not possess the meaning through which I see myself.
The kiss was not a love of death.
It was the last boundary of sovereignty when force tried to seize everything.
When no door remains for a human being to open, no road for him to take, and no court to protect him, there may remain within him one final space that the machinery cannot enter unless he allows it to shape how he interprets himself.
Here, Reisan becomes larger than the image of a man before a rope.
He becomes a question addressed to every power that imagines that possessing the moment of death grants it ownership of life:
What remains for you to take if you cannot make the human being see himself through your eyes?
Authority may restrain the body.
It may besiege the voice.
It may write the judgment.
It may choose the hour of execution.
But it does not become the owner of a human being’s meaning merely because it has become the owner of the moment of his death.
The power to end a human life does not confer the power to possess the meaning of that life.
The right to life does not protect the beating of the heart separately from the human being who carries it. It protects the body, the name, the family, the language, the memory, the capacity to think, to object, to belong, and to participate in making the future.
This is the “human sphere”: the space within which a person can live as a whole human being, not as a body whose death has merely been postponed.
When the gallows places the rope around his neck, it attempts to reduce this entire sphere to a single point:
Death.
But the human being is greater than the moment in which he is killed.
A people is greater than the prison through which some of its people pass.
And the land is greater than the authority that controls it during one period of history.
Nor should the memory of those who were executed be turned into a factory for new hatred.
If the gallows produces a counter-gallows, it has succeeded in imposing its language upon its victims.
If death becomes the only language through which we understand sacrifice, then we have allowed death to occupy even our imagination of freedom.
Loyalty to Reisan does not mean loving the rope he kissed.
Loyalty to him means building a world in which no other human being needs to kiss a rope to prove that he is free.
And loyalty to every Ahwazi who went to the gallows does not mean adding his name to a wall of mourning. It means turning his name into knowledge, knowledge into law, law into protection, and protection into an institution that reaches the human being before it becomes too late to reach him.
No human being is infallible, but every human being is irreplaceable.
When a human being is executed, a body does not merely disappear. A memory disappears that no one else carries in exactly the same way; possibilities that were never lived; words that were never spoken; corrections that never occurred; reconciliations that never took place; and truths that may have lost their final witness.
In its deepest meaning, the gallows is not a rope around the neck of an individual.
It is a claim that a human institution possesses enough certainty to erase an entire branch of the future.
The question, then, is not whether the state possesses the power to kill a human being in the name of law.
The question is: Does it possess the knowledge that entitles it to close his future forever?
The modern state is not infallible. It has judges, investigators, officials, apparatuses, interests, blind spots, and incomplete information.
Civilization does not begin when the state acquires limitless power; it begins when the state knows, because it is human, where its power must stop.
States may change.
Prisons may fall.
Ropes may wear away.
The names of judges and jailers may become marginal notes in a distant archive.
But the “paradox of final certainty” will remain:
How can a being that knows it is fallible build a justice that acts, in its final moment, as though it were infallible?
And what kind of being has the human being decided to become when he has become capable of taking another human life in the name of law?
As for Reisan, he did not make the gallows immortal.
He did the opposite.
He made it look smaller than the human being it sought to end.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
10 October 2026